Congress of Racial Equality

CONGRESS OF RACIAL EQUALITY

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CONGRESS OF RACIAL EQUALITY. Founded in 1942 in Chicago, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was originally an interracial group seeking to use Gandhian tactics of nonviolent direct action in the struggle for racial equality. During the 1940s, it organized sitins and pickets to protest segregation in public accommodations and had success in integrating public facilities in the North. In 1947, CORE organized the "Journey of Reconciliation," the precusor to its later "Freedom Rides." Eight black and eight white men traveled together throughout the upper South to test the 1946 Supreme Court ruling that segregation on buses in interstate travel was unconstitutional. The men were beaten in some towns, and three ended up working on a chain gang in North Carolina after convictions under local segregation laws. But the journey was not a failure; it garnered national publicity and kicked off CORE's long campaign against discrimination in interstate travel.

Despite the success of its early efforts, CORE remained a minor organization until the southern black college student sit-ins of 1960, for which CORE officials provided guidance. The organization became nationally famous a year later with its Freedom Rides. In December 1960, the Supreme Court extended its earlier decision banning segregation on interstate buses with a ruling that prohibited segregation in the waiting rooms and restaurants serving interstate bus passengers. CORE decided to test compliance with the decision by once again sending interracial teams on buses throughout the Deep South. The freedom riders' dramatic challenge to southern segregation and the violent response ultimately led to the ending of segregation on interstate bus routes.

By the end of 1961, CORE had 53 chapters throughout the United States. For the next four years, it played a major role in the African American protest movement, North and South. CORE participated in President Kennedy's Voter Education Project. It was part of the 1963 Birmingham campaign that included the CORE-SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) Freedom Walk in honor of a white postal carrier who had been assassinated as he walked across Alabama wearing signboards urging an end to segregation. CORE also cosponsored the 1963 March on Washington. Along with SNCC and the NAACP, it organized the Mississippi Freedom Summer project in 1964. And it organized rent strikes, school boycotts, and demonstrations against police brutality in cities outside of the South.

By the middle of the 1960s, however, CORE was losing members and, in the minds of some, relevancy. In 1966, Floyd McKissick replaced James Farmer as National Director of the organization. McKissick endorsed "Black Power" and moved the organization away from its original commitment to interracialism and nonviolent direct action. Current National Director Roy Innis replaced McKissick in 1968. Innis focused CORE's efforts on black economic development and community self-determination. Innis has become one of the country's leading black conservatives, a philosophical position indicated by his support of the nominations of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court. By the end of the twentieth century, CORE had a membership of around 100,000.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bell, Inge Powell. CORE and the Strategy of Nonviolence. New York: Random House, 1968.

Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–63. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.

Farmer, James. Freedom, When? New York: Random House, 1965.

Meier, August, and Elliott Rudwick. CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement, 1942–1968. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Powledge, Fred. Free At Last?: The Civil Rights Movement and the People Who Made It. Boston: Little, Brown, 1991.

Sitkoff, Harvard. The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954–1980. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.

August Meier

Cynthia R. Poe

See also Black Nationalism ; Civil Rights Movement ; Freedom Riders ; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ; Suffrage: African American Suffrage .